My application was responded to quickly and I had a telephone interview within a week. That was followed up by an in-person interview a few weeks later. The in-person interview started off very strange. I met with the same person who conducted the phone interview and she was friendly but the owner didn’t get up out of her seat to greet me - she simply held out her hand. There was no small talk to start off the meeting. The HR person laid out the “rules of engagement” for the interview: questions from them, conversational, questions from me. The owner only seemed to smile when she was talking with the HR woman and while she listened to my answers to their questions, it seemed clear to me that she’d made up her mind even before I walked in. Even though I wasn’t offered a job, I had already decided during the interview that I wouldn’t be a good fit there. I didn’t respect the owner because I didn’t feel like she was at all friendly. I thought that if you were on her good side, you’d be fine. If you happened to be on her bad side, then I didn’t know if or how you could crawl back up. In my mind, I started feeling sorry for the people that worked there.